The purpose of this study is to assess the proposition that adoption of a market orientation leads to improved service quality for service sector organisations. We argue that an organisational culture incorporating customer care as its central tenet and involving efforts to understand the needs...

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of business process outsourcing (BPO) strategies and analyzes related issues. The discussions in this chapter can serve as an aid to decision makers who face the great dilemma of whether to insource or outsource a process, and additionally how to...

Many terminologies have grown out of the outsourcing and offshoring bandwagon. While the corporate world continues to experience these phenomena, the academic world continues to research the same. An attempt has been made to give an overview of the various alternatives in sourcing maze. We first...

A national survey of firms that participated in outsourcing relationships was conducted, and service quality and relationship quality were found to be significantly and positively related to each other and both had a significant impact on user satisfaction. However, the intricacies of the causal...

The primary purpose of this chapter is to present descriptive real-life case studies of two very different offshore-outsourced custom software development projects (that the author has actually worked for). The first case study discusses the practical issues in two fixed-term/fixed-price custom...

This paper advances theory on the process of collaboration between entities and its implications on the quality of services, information, and/or products (SIPs) that the collaborating entities provide to each other. It investigates the scenario of outsourced IS projects (such as custom software...

We have attempted to explain why professional service firms (PSFs) even in some of the most canonical examples (e.g., law firms) fail to follow the traditional definition. Growth in the size and geographic diversification of law firms has transformed their organizational structures and in some...

This study attempts to highlight the paradoxical aspects of top management power contests within customer firms that outsource information technology (IT) work. Intraorganizational power theory forms the overarching theoretical basis for this study. The focus is on the antecedents and...

IT outsourcing contracts are often discontinued in favor of other alternatives (returning to in-house development, or switching to another vendor). Switching costs are experienced when terminating a business relationship and securing an alternative. We tried to answer the question: do switching...

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of business process outsourcing (BPO) strategies and analyzes related issues. The discussions in this chapter can serve as an aid to decision makers who face the great dilemma of whether to insource or outsource a process, and additionally how to...